Internet-based travel reservation systems for making reservations and planning trips for individual users are well-known. Websites, such as expedia.com and travelocity.com, provide individual users with the ability to research prices and availability and make reservations for airlines, hotel rooms, rental cars and even vacation activities. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,309,355 and 5,422,809, for example, describe early examples of computerized reservation systems that coordinated reservations among multiple travel service providers for individual customers. Travel agents have long used computerized reservation systems, such as the SABRE system, to provide similar services. U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,975 describes an example of how the SABRE system coordinates and manages the databases for multiple travel vendors in response to requests from customers for information.
Computerized systems have also been developed for the providers of services to aid in the scheduling and management of the facilities and services of a given provider. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,404,291 and 5,909,668 and U.S. Publ. Appl. 2002/0120478A1 describe management systems for managing inventories of hotel rooms and banquet halls, for example, for a single facility or vendor. U.S. Pat. No. 6,389,454 and U.S. Publ. Appls. 2003/0005055A1 and 2003/0115085A1 describe a management system for clinics, for example, with multiple facilities that can automatically make appointments at the various facilities in response to packets of client information or check on the status of facilities in response to patient requests.
Most of these computerized management systems have been designed to assist service providers in managing and responding to requests from individual customers or small groups of customers. The management of requests from customers with large groups, corporations or organizations for large meetings or gatherings, commonly referred to as events, presents a different set of challenges. U.S. Pat. No. 5,634,016, for example, describes an event management system that a single provider, such as a large hotel or retreat center, may use to respond to requests for meeting or event proposals by providing information on pricing and availability of rooms in the facility, and also providing 3-D CAD drawings of the meeting room layouts and other details of the planning and design associate with hosting the event at that facility. U.S. Publ. Appls. 2002/0046076A1 and 2002/0072939A1 also describe event management systems that use the Internet and various databases to coordinate planning and reservations for events hosted and/or organized by a single service provider. Other related computerized event management systems include a management system for hosting multiple virtual conventions online, as described in U.S. Publ. Appl. 2001/0014865A1 and an Internet based event planning and management system that aids the organizers of such events in planning the event and communicating with attendees as described in U.S. Publ. Appl. 2001/0156787A1 which was marketed by Event411 as the PremierPlanner™ planning system.
All of these management systems for events have focused either on event management systems that operate based on a single provider model or that are providing management systems for the customer/organizers of the event, not the providers of services and hospitality for the event. The limitations inherent in these existing single provider or single organizer event management systems restrict them from being effectively used for the next larger class of events, which will be referred to for purposes of the present invention as “destination events.” Destination events include conventions, conferences, exhibitions and the like with hundreds or thousands of attendees that are hosted by the destination in a variety of independently managed facilities with services provided by multiple different vendors that often extend over multiple days. The increased size and number of service providers involved with destination events brings an exponential increase in the complexity of the management required to effectively host these destination events.
Most often, the overall coordination and hosting of a destination event is managed by the convention visitor's bureau (CVB) for the destination. CVB's are typically some hybrid of public/private organization tasked with the goal of promoting a given destination to the benefit of both the community at large and the service providers in that area. A typical destination event sales cycle will involve contacts by or with a prospective destination event organizer by a sales representative for the CVB. The overall parameters of a potential destination event are communicated between the destination event organizer and the sales representative for the CVB typically in the form of a request for proposal (RFP), including such things as desired convention hall and meeting spaces, schedules of anticipated quantities and rates for hotel rooms, proposed dates, schedules for related venue events and attractions, and prices and availability for related logistical and support services, such as transportation services, catering, equipment rental and the like. In order to respond to each RFP, the CVB staff will individually communicate with the various service providers, such as hotels, meeting halls, convention centers, etc. about the RFP, collect and organize the responses and prepare a response to the RFP outlining what the CVB is able to offer on behalf of a destination for the proposed destination event. It will be recognized that, unlike the situation of presenting a proposal from a single service provider, the proposal from the CVB in response to an RFP is only a first step in a complicated multi-party process. If a destination event organizer likes a given proposal, then individual hotel and meeting space contracts, for example, need to be negotiated with each of the independently operated service providers.
There are only a limited number of systems that have attempted to address the management and logistical challenges associated with providing a computerized management system for handling destination events. To date, all of these systems have utilized a client-server model that requires the CVB, for example, to purchase, customize and maintain proprietary server-based software running on servers at the CVB. CVB staff will enter the data collected from phone calls, faxes and emails with a multitude of service providers into the CVB databases for the client-server management system. Examples of these systems include: Event 3000™, Housing 3000™, and Destination 3000™, provided by Software Management, Inc.; EBMS® provided by Ungerboeck Systems International, InfoTrac™, Inquiry+™ and Housing+™ provided by John Paradiso & Associates and CVBreeze by NewMarket International.
Recently, some of these systems have begun to promote integration of the Internet into their client-server software in order to allow third party service providers and destination event planners/customers to have limited and controlled access to some of the various databases maintained by these CVB client-server systems. The iEBMS® system provided by Ungerboeck Systems International and the e-CVB™ system provided by Software Management Inc. are good examples of the efforts to integrate the Internet into conventional CVB client-server systems. While these systems offer a standard Internet-based interface for updating contact information and similar publicly available information about the various service provider who are members of a CVB, they can require detailed and extensive customization in order to provide additional functionality that interfaces with the CVB client-server system.
Although computerized management systems for destination events are necessarily quite complicated due to the size and number of parties involved in coordinating and hosting such destination events, the problem with the current approach to integration of the Internet into destination event computerized management systems is that the client-server model requires the CVB either to become an expert in the management software package in order to address issues such as maintenance, upgrades and security or to continue to spend large amounts of money to hire out these services to the providers of such computerized management systems. In addition, the inherent limitations of a client-server model for such computerized management systems creates barriers to the most effective utilization of a computerized management system by both the CVB and the various service providers represented by the CVB in preparing responses to RFPs from destination event organizers/customers.